'Smart' robotic car intersections to soon reduce human error

In preparation for a world of robot cars, engineers have created a robot traffic cop to get them through intersections faster and more safely, it has been revealed.

According to the traffic signal's creators, since such smart intersections would minimize human error, they would be safer than intersections are now.

Intelligent crossroads would also save every car an average of 35 seconds of wait time per stoplight.

In their calculations, Hesham Rakha, a Virginia Tech engineering professor, and his doctoral student, Ismail Zohdy, assumed that everyone will be using robotic cars in the near future.

"You will not be driving your car anymore; you will be driven by your car," Discovery News quoted Zohdy as saying in a statement.

Robotic cars are closer to reality than many may think, Rakha and Zohdy wrote in a paper about their smart traffic signal. They cited some driverless cars under development now, including Google-made cars and research vehicles from Stanford University.

While other researchers have written computer programs for how driverless cars should act at intersections, Rakha and Zohdy say their controller takes into account more variables than other systems do. It calculates different cars' engine capacities, for example.

In the futuristic intersections that Rakha and Zohdy imagined, cars coming up to the intersection would send data about their location and speed to a central controller. Meanwhile, the controller would gather information about the weather, the speed limit at the intersection and how many lanes the intersection has. Once a car gets close enough, the controller would direct the car along paths that it has calculated are the swiftest, while remaining safe.

The result is an intersection where cars don't need to pause as often or as long as human-driven vehicles need to.

"The proposed intersection controller, which allows vehicles to keep moving, reduces the delay for each vehicle compared to traditional intersection control," Rakha said.

"Keeping vehicles moving is also more fuel efficient and reduces emissions," he added.

The researchers presented their work at the Intelligent Transportation Society World Congress in October. (ANI)